Enhancement Details

Enhancements for Managing Product Structures - Part Type Management

In this release, Windchill PDMLink provides enhanced support for organizing and managing their product structure. With these new capabilities, companies will be able to easily define and manage several aspects of a product architecture at a Windchill system level.

Benefits and Description

Many companies need to organize their products with higher level descriptions of the product architecture and then add more detailed product information within these higher level descriptions.

Windchill 9.1 provides three capabilities to help system and business administrators manage higher level product architecture descriptions

Association Constraints between Part Types - With Windchill 9.1, a business or system administrator will be able to define constraints between Part types to limit which part types may be associated with other part types in the Type Manager. For example, Part Type A may only be connected with Part Type B (and not Part Type C).

Multiple Part Usage types – Windchill 9.1 provides the ability to define more than one type of part usage link to define and manage a set of usage attributes in the Type Manager. Using association constraints, a system or business administrator may define which part usage type should be used when relating between Part types

Part type restricted commands – A system administrator may restrict a set of actions for a Part type used for the entire Windchill system via a system configuration file. For example, some part types are organizational in nature and do not need to be revised or promoted. With these capabilities, certain part types will not have these actions throughout the Windchill system.

With these definitions of Product architecture in place, end user actions will be controlled by these definitions. For example, if an end user is trying to add a child to a Part of Type A, the search results for this addition will only include Parts of Type B.